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Comment by hnlurker | Hacker News Reader

Crack and cocaine aren't really all that similar. Crack and meth are tho. Guess what, they both have the same mandatory mins too.

When you look for racism everywhere, you find it everywhere. Let's be more objective, eh?

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"Crack" and cocaine are literally the same drug.

Maybe at one point. It's changed.

How come we hear about dangerous meth-heads and crack-heads, but not about coke-heads?

Meth and crack are both cheaper than coke, which results in class/socioeconomic effects in who uses them as well as how they're portrayed in media and handled by government.

An other difference is that snorting coke leads to a somewhat delayed, milder and much longer euphoric effect. Injection and smoking lead to much faster, more intense and shorter highs. So the differences in methods of consumption would lead to very different patterns of behaviour as well e.g. it's less likely that you can do things on a crack high than after snorting coke, and the intensity of the high would lead to increased odds of chasing the high.

Plus the duration of the high means that you'd necessarily have to spend more time (relatively) chasing that high or ways to achieve it.

The thing that makes meth heads and crack heads dangerous is primarily that the users are desperate for money to feed their addiction and thus more likely to commit crimes to make money. Coke heads probably started out fairly wealthy, since it's a more expensive drug, so they are less likely to resort to theft to pay for their addiction. It's probably also somewhat of a social class issue. Crack and meth users are probably more likely to have grown up in rough circumstances that make them more likely to commit violence whether or not they are under the influence of drugs. Reporting bias is probably also a bit of an issue. If a rich coke user assaults someone they may be able to sweep it under the rug by writing a big check to the victim, whereas a poor user would be thrown into the criminal justice system. A final hypothesis is that cocaine users have more resources for dealing with addiction (such as rehab) than other drug users. That would skew the population of active coke users towards recreational users rather than addicts.

There are chemical differences between crack, meth, and cocaine, so it's likely that, ceteris paribus, crack users are more violent than coke users, but it's not the only factor. It's really hard to tease out differences in the effects of the drugs when the populations of users are so different.

Surely one could control for wealth to tease out the effect? There has to be enough overlap between two large groups.

Oh wait, here we go: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20560836/

[...] The likelihood of violence associated with crack cocaine users was greater compared to powdered cocaine users at the bivariate level. However, these differences were almost uniformly statistically nonsignificant when demographic, mood and non-cocaine substance use disorders were controlled for. [...]

Racism/classism - crack is associated with black & poor people, coke is for rich people.

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